WORKFORCE SURVEYS

Attract and retain the patients you aspire to serve by offering the care network, access, and experience they need. See a list of our capabilities below or visit the Optum website for more information about our comprehensive approach to health care operations.

Improve quality and outcomes and lower costs by eliminating unwarranted deviation from the best standard of care. See a list of our capabilities below or visit the Optum website for more information about our comprehensive approach to data and analytics.

Sustain the financial stability to serve your community by making sure you’re paid efficiently for services rendered. See a list of our capabilities below or visit the Optum website for more information about our comprehensive approach to revenue cycle management.

With the benefit of hindsight, the Bipartisan Budget Act (BBA) of 2018 not only looks like the most significant health care legislation since 2015's MACRA—it also appears to validate the power of major advocacy organizations to push through incremental legislative change in an otherwise gridlocked political environment.

The past few years have seen a frenzy of health system mergers, as providers look to consolidation as a means to get on solid strategic and financial ground for a very challenging future. But for many, while consolidation has often succeeded in bringing greater price leverage and buying power, the larger, hoped-for financial benefits have been elusive. According to a study of recent mergers and acquisitions, 59% of acquired hospitals failed to outperform their market peers two years after acquisition. Moreover, one in five acquired hospitals actually went from having positive margins before being acquired to negative margins two years after the acquisition.

Hospitals and health systems feeling margin pressures are not alone. Moody's recently predicted that not-for-profits health systems' operating cash flow will shrink by 2% to 4% over the next 18 months. Indeed, in an environment of rising costs and uncertain revenue growth, there are no shortage of reasons for flagging margins.

But although the cost and revenue challenges are industry wide, their exact impact can differ significantly from hospital to hospital. To define and implement an effective margin strategy, hospitals need to understand the root causes of their margin performance.

Few hospitals and health systems doubt the financial impact of effective inpatient clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs. The same principle—that providers must document and code both patient illness and care activities to ensure full payment and minimize audit or denial risk—holds in the physician-office setting as well.

Coming just a few weeks after CMS finalized its decision to roll backmandatory bundles, the agency's announcement of the BPCI Advancedvoluntary bundled payment program has reenergized leaders committed to managing episodic costs.

Maintaining healthy margins is no longer just an exercise in cost management. In our consumer-driven market, it’s a strategic and continuous undertaking that separates providers of choice from the rest.